Review of Mirror Mirror (2012) by Clarisesamuels — 21 Sep 2012

This movie was a bit of a mishmash. Having recently finished watching Season 1 of television series Once Upon a Time, Julia Roberts in the role of the evil queen does not compare well to Lana Parrilla.

Parrilla's evil queen is a double character appearing both in the traditional fairy-tale realm and in a modern-day scenario, and Parrilla gives an original reinterpretation of the character that is hard to surpass, even if Parrilla is almost an unknown compared to Roberts.

Yet, there are some interesting aspects to this reinvention of the Grimms' fairy tale. The ball gowns worn by Julia Roberts and Lily Collins (Snow White) are resplendent. The castle on the hilltop, the village, and the home of the seven dwarves are imaginative sets.

The film holds your interest, and parts of it will leave you almost spellbound, but afterward you will forget most of the story because it was too disconnected and chaotic, almost nonsensical. The spell-breaker at the end is seeing Snow White doing a music video during the final credits, where she sings a rock song with the repeated phrase--I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe in love, love.

I assume Lily Collins wants to be a singer, and her contract promised her one song in the movie--somewhere. The dwarves are renamed for trademark reasons, so we have Napoleon, Half-Pint, Grub, Grimm, Wolf, Butcher, and Chuckles.

They have a complex about being short, so they are thieves who rob travelers while wearing stilts. Armie Hammer as the love interest for both Snow and the step-mom starts out showing promise, but when Roberts slips him a love potion that accidentally causes puppy love, which literally means the victim wants to follow his master everywhere and lick his master's face, things start getting a bit exaggerated.

This is probably why the film doesn't work as well as it should have. There's an inclination to be a seriously creative reinvention of the Snow White story coupled with a desire to be a spoof where everyone hams it up.

(Nathan Lane, as the Queen's valet, gives up on high art and jumps into the spoof, so he's the most consistent character.) It's confusing. Roberts' character is the most confusing of all, and it seems the director kept changing his mind, so sometimes she borders on being truly evil and sometimes she is mocking her own character.

The queen's mirror is not the conventional mirror of Snow White lore. When the Queen demands a consultation, she enters a body of water from which she arises, and then walks into a thatched-roof hut on a tiny island in another dimension, somewhere tropical; although the natives are absent, it could have been Henri Rousseau's Banana Harvest.

The conversations with the oracle might have been an interesting opportunity to philosophize, but this was not an intellectual movie. The only words of wisdom imparted by the oracle in the mirror (nicely, and seriously, played by Roberts)--there is a price to pay for magic.

In the end, you can watch this movie for light entertainment. It won't give you nightmares.